When there is a crisis of the conscience, the natural human response on the part of many churchgoers is to put a little something extra into the collection plate on Sunday. That is roughly what the nation did in 1957 when it created the Commission on Civil Rights.

Just three years previously the Supreme Court, in Brown, had invalidated the old separate-but-equal rule. Some of the southern states had resolved to resist the decision with all their might. Civilrights groups had countered by mobilizing for a fight that would last longer than they expected.

As Great Britain passed into the second half of the nineteenth century, she stood on the thresholdof universal manhood suffrage. Precedent for reform had been set in 1832 but in many ways the soul-searching which culminated in the Reform Bill of 1867 was much more traumatic. Rule by a hereditary aristocracy had been weakened in 1832. Narrow suffrage based on property, nevertheless, preserved the principle of elitist rule. Because of this, Parliament was more of an “equalitarian aristocracy” than a modern democratic institution. The system seemed more rational after 1832 but Parliament still represented “property and intelligence” and the political position of the vast majority of people remained unchanged.

It has long been recognized that interest groups, formed in many cases for nonpolitical ends, have manifested an almost “inevitable gravitation toward government.” Truman has noted that modern industrial life involves disruptions of social equilibria established in an earlier and simpler era, and that interest group leaders, in an effort to restore some degree of social balance, turn to government as a mediating agent.

It has often been pointed out that the Messianic creeds and extremist ideologies of our century represent the displacement of traditional by radically new world views. Similar and no less dramatic reconstructions of reality, implicit and explicit, are reflected in modern man's movement, evidenced most clearly since the Second World War, toward secular humanism. The purpose of this article is to explore some of the implications, both secular and religious, of this trend, and to delineate what seem to be the most conspicuous characteristics held in common by the new world views that have emerged. In doing so I must acknowledge considerable indebtedness to the preliminary explorations of several contemporary writers, notably Eric Voegelin and J. L. Talmon.

Aristotle's ancient biographers adduce several reasons to explain why in the year 367 B.C. the young Stagirite, who at the time was 16 years old (or in his seventeenth year), went to Athens, or was brought there by his “guardian” Proxenus. According to one tradition, he moved there because of the advice given by the Delphic oracle. Ibn Abi Usaibia relates that, in keeping with some ancient reports, “this happened because Proxenus and Plato were close personal friends.” We do not know, however, whether Usaibia's explanation is based on historical fact, nor are we able to ascertain the ultimate source of this story. Naturally, it might always be maintained that young Aristotle went to Athens in 367 B.C. for the purpose of securing the best education available in the Hellenic world, particularly, since by that year the fame of Isocrates and that of his school of rhetoric (and, judging from Pseudo-Plato, Fifth Epistle, perhaps that of the Platonic Academy) must have reached Macedonia.

The achievement of independence in tropical Africa temporarily checked the rise of nationalist sentiment. In most territories hopes gave way to a sense of anticlimax, a heightened awareness of social stratification and the resurgence of ethnic loyalties. The reactive process which produced the beginnings of organized mass followings and much wider popular acclaim for charismatic leaders had ended at least, in the clearly focused form of demands for one man, one vote, political independence and national development as opposed to overt colonial dependency.